The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

A Welsh squire drags his household to Bath, Harrogate, London and Scotland for the waters, and five of them write home about the same journey: the gouty uncle, the sour spinster, the star-struck niece, the nephew from Oxford and the maid who spells as she hears. Smollett was a surgeon and a hack who died within months of publishing it in 1771. The joke is that nobody's version agrees with anyone else's. Fifty-eight plates by Hogarth and Rowlandson track the coach, the inn and the tavern through which five travellers see the same road.